Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  The difficulty of integrating symbolic scenes with a novel overtly realistic in parts is cleverly managed by Dickens the novelist, but not so perfectly that we don’t feel an occasional jolt. Thus the problem of returning Pip from the realm of the ordeal and spiritual regeneration is rather startlingly solved by his returning to consciousness in the incongruous but thoroughly mundane presence of Trabb’s boy, and yet having Pip express a conviction that the ordeal had lasted more than two days and nights, and ‘thinking a thanksgiving’ as he passes the vapour of the kiln again, safe with his friends. The ordeal entailed physical and moral suffering and endurances but this was subsidiary to admissions of guilt in forms that Pip had never allowed to come to the surface before now when, under stress and duress from Orlick, he has to answer accusations that reach depths of guilty conscience he cannot avoid with death staring him in the face – ‘I felt that I had come to the brink of my grave’, Pip says, Pip has worse than death to endure, the certainty of defamation in the minds of those most dear to him since with his body disposed of in the lime-kiln Provis and Herbert will think he has run away: thinking of Provis now as Estella’s father, his imagination feverishly connects her with this too – ‘I saw myself despised by unborn generations – Estella’s children and their children’. He accepts even this in the face of his ‘miserable errors’ for which he prays for forgiveness. Having virtually died in enduring the agonies of death and anticipating extinction, he can now be reborn; this is delicately indicated – we note that next morning he wakes up in London to a new world, Wordsworth’s vision of a London all bright and glittering in the smokeless air, and he adds, ‘From me, too, a veil seemed to be drawn, and I felt strong and well.’ The gradual process we noted, by which Pip had been unconsciously shedding his acquired egoism, and false views of life, has been accelerated by the encounter with Orlick and the ghosts of his early terrors and guilt. Pip is now content to forgo all his worldly possessions and worldy hopes:

  Where I might go, what I might do, or when I might return, were questions utterly unknown to me; nor did I vex my mind with them, for it was wholly set on Provis’s safety.

  Thus, in the next step of reversing and rejecting his past self, the journey down the river in the boat that he steers ‘freshened me with new hope’ – the hope of a new life in which he has renounced all his great expectations and accepts that he has his own way to make. When it darkens light seems to come from the river more than the sky, and ‘the oars in their dipping struck at a few reflected stars’ – the tact with which Dickens offers the evidence so sparingly but adequately should be respected. Even when the law cuts in at the last moment to claim its own and Magwitch is wounded in the struggle, Pip’s new self is equal to the demands he now makes on it, which are far greater than Magwitch himself is willing to make.

  I took my place at Magwitch’s side. I felt that that was my place henceforth while he lived. For now my repugnance to him had all melted away, and in the hunted wounded shackled creature who held my hand in his, I only saw a man who had meant to be my benefactor, and who had felt affectionately, gratefully, and generously, towards me with great constancy through a series of years. I only saw in him a much better man than I had been to Joe.

  The significant operative idea is in the last sentence, and carries the novel on after Magwitch’s death to Pip’s necessary accommodation with Joe.

  The strength of Pip’s resolution is shown in the trial scene and at Magwitch’s death-bed. Again The Pilgrim’s Progress is invoked. The trial and the scene in court are deliberately written of in terms that recall the trial of Faithful with Christian in attendance, and the capital letters with which Dickens sprinkles the pages of chapter LVI show the allegorical intention, that we must identify Pip’s society with Bunyan’s Vanity Fair, giving the Sessions, the hanging Judge, and the heartless spectators the condemnation that Bunyan gives his. It shows us why Pip prefers to stand trial, as it were, with his convict, by identifying with him in the eyes of his world. Pip says:

  He held my hand while all the others were removed, and while the audience got up (putting their dresses right, as they might at church or elsewhere) and pointed down at this criminal or that, and most of all at him and me.

  ‘Audience’, and one which considers trials and church services equally social occasions; and an audience which has come to watch as an entertainment ‘two-and-thirty men and women put before the Judge to receive that sentence [of Death] together’, a society both heartless and self-righteous which can, now it is fully known, no longer inspire Pip with social shame. To make this clear he has stood by the dock ‘holding the hand that he stretched forth to me’ – we must realize that this is again a purely symbolic gesture and additional proof that the trial scene is essential and not literal truth for in real life no one would have been allowed to hold the hand of the criminal in the dock: Dickens of course knew this and so also did his readers, since the public were then connoisseurs of criminal trials (no doubt Dickens’s reason for pillorying that interest here). Pip’s change of attitude to his society and to his convict are therefore seen to be independent of Magwitch’s personality – the assertion of some critics that Dickens has worked a trick (by turning the old lag into another Joe) to secure Pip’s acceptance of him now is unjustified.

  Thus we get to Pip’s revelation to the dying man of his daughter’s existence and Pip’s love for her, which has again been criticized adversely, as if Pip were concocting a deliberate lie. But Pip speaks only the truth about Magwitch’s lost child: ‘She is living now. She is a lady and very beautiful. And I love her.’ This is a selection of true facts designed to give the dying man the greatest gratification he could receive, and even if it possibly had a false suggestion (that she might marry Pip), who could censure Pip in these circumstances? Pip produces these facts in all unselfishness, and with an obvious effort, one of the last it is necessary he should make to free himself from the Pip who, among other things, had assured himself, in his original revulsion against his convict patron: ‘Never had I breathed, and never would I breathe – or so I resolved – a word of Estella to Provis’ (the parenthesis shows that Dickens had already prepared for the last step in Pip’s retraction). The fact that Estella is already Mrs Bentley Drummle does not detract from Pip’s obligation to confess his knowledge of her and love for her to her father.

  Dickens had clearly given a great deal of thought to the problem of convincingly freeing Pip from the bonds of selfishness, shame and guilt. Thus in the magnificent scene of Magwitch’s return, when Pip thinks of him only as the convict who once sent him money out of gratitude, he returns the two one-pound notes with two ‘clean and new’ ones and with a patronizing conventional remark. Silently Magwitch burns the notes, showing Pip both that he is now rich himself and that the return of money is not what he has come for. Pip takes in both these points, but he doesn’t see the meanness of spirit revealed in his believing that kindness and gratitude can be repaid with money, or that what was then a large sum for a poor man to give is a negligible sum for rich Pip to repay. But his enlightenment as to such matters is shown us when he tells Joe and Biddy before leaving England to work under Herbert as a clerk:

  ‘And when I say that I shall never rest until I have worked for the money with which you have kept me out of prison, and have sent it to you, don’t think dear Joe and Biddy, that if I could repay it a thousand times over, I suppose I could cancel a farthing of the debt I owe you, or that I would do so if I could.’

  A convincing proof of a change of heart, and a proof of the understanding of what spiritual health is by the novelist himself, a man who had by perpetual hard work made himself rich but who freely gave his money and services in the spirit of true generosity to those less fortunate than himself. The suggestion of one critic that Great Expectations was written because Dickens now felt guilty at being a rich man is absurd; as is another’s suggestion that Dickens used the story of Miss Havisham who had been jilted and deceived by her professed lover
because, having separated from his own wife, he needed to express his sense of guilt thus. Miss Havisham is so evidently marginal as a picturesque convenience; the significance, which swallows her up, is the whole context of Satis House, and as the producer of Estella she is the parallel to Magwitch the patron of Pip. Pip and Estella are equally victims of an idée fixe.

  Pip is now left with his relations with Joe to put right. Here the ironic mode of the novel comes into operation again. The revelatory dreams Pip has in his fever after the trial (his trial as well as Magwitch’s) prove the genuineness of his renunciation of a privileged position in such a society as he has learned his London to be the centre of. He remembers:

  that I suffered greatly, that I often lost my reason, that the time seemed interminable, that I confounded impossible existences with my own identity; that I was a brick in the house wall, and yet entreating to be released from the giddy place where the builders had set me; that I was a steel beam of a vast engine, clashing and whirling over a gulf, and yet that I implored in my own person to have the engine stopped, and my part in it hammered off; that I passed through these phases of disease, I know of my own remembrance. That I sometimes struggled with real people, in the belief that they were murderers, and that I would all at once comprehend that they meant to do me good …

  When he finds it is Joe who is nursing him it is easy in his weakness to return to childhood and his old easy relation with Joe: ‘I fancied I was little Pip again.’ But Dickens neither simplifies nor sentimentalizes the situation: that no one can be a child again is one of the stern realities of experience. Pip can now withstand the maddening effect of the repetitiveness and illiterate formulations of Joe’s conversation and exercise the tact of goodwill, and remembering his debt and Joe’s goodness, kiss Joe’s hand in true affection. But the relations of Pip’s childhood are impossible as Pip, growing stronger, also grows older. The bond of affection is even enhanced by Pip’s new humility but contact becomes difficult to sustain though Pip is ashamed to find that this is so. It is not Pip’s fault, for Joe feels the strain too and starts calling Pip ‘Sir’ compulsively and Pip, though distressed and remorseful, doesn’t see how to check Joe’s retreat from a Pip who can no longer be treated like a child. It is ended by Joe’s returning home without warning. Now Pip has a final decision to make: instead of being Herbert’s clerk should he not offer to return to the point where he left the forge? – go back to work for Joe and, if Biddy will have him, marry her and settle in the village; that is, lead the life he would have done if Miss Havisham and Estella had not intervened for good or ill to propel him into becoming a gentleman.

  This is the part of the novel that has been most misinterpreted and for which Dickens has got least credit. It is necessary that Pip should make the decision to go back and try, and indeed he has ‘a sense of increasing relief as I drew nearer to them, and a sense of leaving arrogance and untruthfulness further and further behind’. He is to receive a shock comparable to the revelation of his patron – he doesn’t count in Biddy’s life. His real sacrifice is in finding he can’t make this premeditated recompense, for Biddy has married Joe and his pilgrimage (‘I felt like one who is toiling home barefoot from distant travel’) is frustrated, his return an anti-climax. He can’t solve his problems by going back to an earlier point in life and cutting out what he has become in between, he must go on, living with his contrition and difficulties. He leaves the village for good, but this time begs Joe and Biddy to accompany him to the finger-post, instead of, as originally, shrinking from their company to it. Biddy, by marrying Joe and without thinking it necessary to tell Pip of their intention, has made it clear that Pip does not belong to her world and that she belongs to Joe’s. She is neither married off arbitrarily by Dickens to show that Joe is the true gentleman who must marry the true princess to fulfil the fairy-story that the novel is (according to Professor Harry Stone) nor because ‘Pip has found that he has forfeited his right to her’ (Dabney). He had thought it right to offer himself to Biddy to make amends and show his new humility, not because he really believed it would make him happy, and he has to be shown that such an escape from guilt would no more have answered than his becoming a blacksmith again to please Joe. Dickens has made his point repeatedly, that he believes that education and the society of educated people with high standards of integrity like Matthew and Herbert Pocket, represent, other things being equal, a more desirable social habitat than a village-market-town society of Gargerys, Wopsles, Trabbs, Pumblechooks, Hubbies and Orlicks.20 Dickens has intimated that there are real distinctions to be made, based not on money or birth but on cultivation and intelligence and talent. Joe is described by Pip as ‘this gentle Christian man’, which is neither a gentleman nor even a wholly satisfactory practical character; it seems to represent an uneasy gesture of the novelist’s towards making a special status for Joe, to get over the difficulty Joe now presents in having outgrown the original role of ‘a good-natured foolish man’. Joe, in spite of Dickens’s effort to elevate him here, really represents the novelist’s final disenchantment with the Romantic image of the child that Dickens has reached by the path I have traced. In the next and last novels we get only sociologically realistic children: in Our Mutual Friend the deformed and psychologically warped Dolls’ Dressmaker and in Edwin Drood ‘the hideous child’ Deputy who stones Durdles home nightly – inevitable products of their environments. Dickens even as early as Oliver Twist had recognized the need for sociological realism by providing the more plausible charity-school product Noah Claypole to offset or supplement the purely Romantic image of untouched innocence and goodness embodied in Oliver.

  And we should not be misled by the apparent virtue of the simple, wholesome rule-of-thumb morality, ‘Lies is lies’, which Joe produces for Pip’s guidance; we must note that Joe’s wits, after his own introduction into Satis House, ‘brightened by the encounter they had passed through’, (Pip notes), realized that some deception was the best, the necessary, means of managing Mrs Joe in this matter. Finding it as impossible as Pip had done to explain Miss Havisham to his wife, he systematically lies to her, to flatter her into a good humour, involving Pip without consulting him in advance: if this is humour at all it is also something much more. Dickens really needs to make no comment on the inadequacy of simple-minded people thereafter. He has deliberately made his point thus, and it is unmistakable; yet it seems not to have been taken by readers, another instance of the unintelligent reading he habitually receives.

  It is rather odd that American critics should write with such confidence regarding the facts of the English social system in the past as they do with regard to the actualities of the class system operating in Great Expectations, pooh-poohing the idea that Pip had any right to feel that Biddy was not suitable for him as a wife. ‘Pip is now educated, but Biddy is a schoolmistress’ says Mr Ross H. Dabney flatly. ‘In Dickens’s terms there is more of a class barrier between Joe and Biddy than between Pip and Biddy.’ This is simply not the case.21 Biddy was emphatically not the comparatively educated kind of later schoolmistress who had had a course at a teachers’ training college, like Miss Peecher in Our Mutual Friend (but who was still very limited and knew only what she had to teach). Biddy was self-educated just enough to teach the merest elements in the old-style village school, and had never known, or felt the need of, any more enlightened company than that of the forge kitchen, as far as we know. As soon as Pip began to educate himself by systematic study she lost contact with him, and once he returns from London makes this clear by calling him ‘Mr’; her letter, sent to inform Pip of Joe’s impending visit, nicely defines the degree of her literacy and her difficulty of communicating with Pip on all grounds. George Eliot, whose authority cannot be questioned here, shows a village schoolmaster of great natural intelligence and superior abilities, Bartle Massey, who is yet highly respectful to the excellent Rector and never expects to be treated as an equal socially. Bartle, like Dinah the Methodist preacher in the same novel, speak
s in the dialect, and so would Biddy have been tied to the Gargery kind of idiom if Dickens had not falsified her in this respect, thus obscuring another difference from Pip – the outward sign of a real cultural difference and a limitation of interests, experience and knowledge. Dickens cheats over her ability in these circumstances to deflate Pip by having Joe explain that she is exceptionally quick, but she is still not plausible in her role. A coarser style of repartee would have carried more conviction in her case (as it does in Susan Nipper’s), but then Pip’s idea of going back to marry her would have been more obviously impracticable. Dickens avoids idealizing Biddy and so should the modern critic.

  The preference of critics generally for the originally-planned ending to the novel instead of the one printed seems to me incomprehensible. Estella was to marry after Drummle’s death a new character, specially introduced for the purpose, a doctor who had defended her against Drummle’s brutality (Jaggers’s prediction had been correct as to Drummle’s marital conduct). She was subsequently to see Pip accidentally in London walking with Joe and Biddy’s boy whom she thought Pip’s, and to kiss the child for auld lang syne. This has the complete inconsequentialness of life, but is quite unsuitable for the conclusion of such a schematic novel. Dickens’s second thoughts produced the right, because the logical, solution to the problem of how to end without a sentimental ‘happy ending’ but with a satisfactory winding-up of the themes. This he has done with dignity and economy. And we don’t, I think, ask how it is that Estella is now poor, since Miss Havisham’s fortune was described as having been ‘tied up on’ her (the tying, being by Jaggers, would have been too skilfully done for her to have been stripped even by a husband) and since Drummle himself was by definition rich, avaricious and mean, why should he lose his fortune? Dickens could easily have made them the victims of a defaulting trustee or bank, so this doesn’t matter, what is essential is that Estella should be stripped of the attributes that made her both desired by Pip and at the same time out of his reach. Dickens recreates the memory of the spell of Satis House in the appropriate reunion there, the right place at evening, which follows on Pip’s shock at finding the house gone: